Arriving in Paris on one of the few trains still running in the middle of the strike by public sector workers who, as good socialists, were trying to preserve their privileged pension arrangements for all eternity irrespective of the finances of the country, we participated in a brief but Darwinian ...

There are few sounds more frightening than that of the English young enjoying themselves. The English, it was once said, take their pleasures sadly; but now they take them loudly, which is far, far worse. Their pleasures are brutish, and the sounds the men emit while experiencing them are ...

The Swedes are a coldhearted people. When a 15-year-old boy was gunned down in a busy square in Malmo recently, a photograph showed that the townspeople had placed only seventeen candles and seven bouquets of flowers on the site where he had fallen. If the murder had happened in Britain, the ground ...

We do not live in a golden age of the four cardinal virtues; perhaps there never was such an age, which is why life has always been such a mess. But we have gone further than our predecessors. I suspect that most of us would now be unable to name the virtues, let alone exercise them. Just to remind ...

About 25 years ago, I had a patient whose marriage broke up after an hour. Her groom had answered “Yes” to the following question, put to him according to the rites of the Church of England: “Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all ...

A woman in Indiana was recently found asphyxiated to death by a snake—a reticulated python—still wrapped round her neck. This was a death so horrible that you avert your mind from imagining it too closely. In England two years ago a young man was found strangled to death with his pet python ...

Once something is claimed as a right, it enters a different metaphysical plane from all other claims or considerations. It becomes untouchable, immune from derogation, exception, limitation, curtailment, or qualification. It can never be abrogated, for if it were ever to be abrogated it would not ...

Man is the only creature, as far as we know, that enjoys the contemplation of its own disappearance from the face of the earth. We find the prospect of our annihilation by disease, famine, war, asteroid, or climate change deeply satisfying. We feel, somehow, that we deserve it and that the world ...

Recently, it seems to me, there has been a concerted effort, amounting almost to a propaganda campaign, to persuade people that the brutalist strain in architecture was and is a glorious episode in architectural history. This campaign has the ring of guilty people who protest their innocence too ...

I remember well a burglar who was angry at his imprisonment. I was examining him medically shortly after his arrival in what locals called “the big house.” “I don’t need prison,” he said. “Prison’s no good to me.” “But it is to me,” I said mildly. “What do you mean?” he ...